By dropping his re-election bid, the mayor admits his political weakness and reveals some realities of power in Portland.

Many tough things have been said about Sam Adams over the years, but no one has ever accused him of being a quitter.

Adams overcame a poor
childhood in Newport to be elected in 2008 as the first openly gay
mayor of a major American city. Four years earlier, he had stormed back
from a lousy primary showing to win a seat on the City Council. And
during his years as a political aide to Mayor Vera Katz, Adams was
relentless and cunning.

So the news July 29
that he wouldn’t seek re-election after one term as mayor shocked the
city. Adams acknowledges he faced a difficult campaign.

But less tenacious
politicians have survived more damaging scandals than Adams’ sexual
relationship with an 18-year-old former legislative intern. Weaker
politicians have won re-election.

So why did Adams walk
away? He says he would have to become a full-time campaigner if he
wanted to hold office. “I’m just not willing to phone it in as mayor,”
Adams says.

But there’s more to
it. The process of Adams’ decision-making, pieced together through
interviews with the mayor and people close to him, opens a window into
the calculus of power in Portland. The lesson is that even a savvy,
battle-scarred politician cannot overcome certain realities—namely, the
need to raise large sums of money to win, the influence of labor unions
in Oregon, and the lingering public memory of a scandal.

Adams learned the
most crucial facts to inform his political future on Monday, July 25,
when the political consultant who had helped engineer his rise, Mark
Wiener, privately shared some results from a voter opinion poll. The
poll had bad news for Adams: He was in a statistical dead heat with the
two declared candidates, former City Commissioner Charlie Hales and New
Seasons grocery co-founder Eileen Brady.

Wiener confirmed to WW that the poll showed Adams, Hales and Brady essentially tied, with support in the low-20-percent range.

Those numbers are reasonable for candidates just starting out in a citywide campaign, but not for a sitting mayor.

Adams told WW that the poll “showed me, frankly, at a better place than I thought I was going to be.”

That doesn’t explain
why the poll—as Adams told people privately—was key in his decision to
fold his re-election hopes. Commissioner Nick Fish says Adams cited the
poll first in explaining his decision. “He said, ‘I’m making an
announcement today. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to re-election, I
saw a poll on Monday, and I’ve got a pretty big hill to climb,” Fish
recalled.

What’s not been
reported before is that the AFSCME Council 75 and Service Employees
International Local 49 commissioned the poll at the suggestion of
political strategist Kevin Looper, who last year left the directorship
of liberal activist group Our Oregon to run his own independent
political consultancy. (Our Oregon spokesman Scott Moore says the group
had nothing to do with the poll.)

“I did suggest it would be important information for them to have going into the election cycle,” Looper says.

Union leaders say the
poll shows Adams could have won and weren’t sending him a message to
step out of the race. “I think Sam could go down in history as one of
the more pro-working-families mayors ever,” says Ken Allen, executive
director of AFSCME Council 75.

Adams’ exit from the
mayoral race means the unions, whose political power rests in large part
in their ability to get out the vote, have no obvious favorite. Union
leaders say Brady is a question mark; New Seasons employees are not
unionized, although Brady is a confirmed liberal. Portland firefighters
still steam over Hales’ efforts to reform that bureau.

Adams’ departure
means unions may be shopping around for a different candidate. Multnomah
County Commission Chair Jeff Cogen says he didn’t ask for his name to
be tested in a mayoral campaign poll but heard that it was. Cogen told WW that he’s heard that some polling “has me looking very good,” but he’s sticking by his decision not to run for mayor.

SAM ON SUNDAY: Adams updates Twitter from the Willamette River.

Credits: Rebecca Pool

On July 31, a Sunday,
the last day of what he called a “staycation,” Adams drifted in a blue
inflatable raft down the Willamette River past crowds of Portlanders
along the waterfront as part of a fundraiser for Willamette Riverkeeper,
an environmental advocacy group.

Adams must have known
that things would not be the same when he went back to the office on
Monday. Two days earlier he had become a lame duck, and here he was,
doing what ducks do best: floating.

FACT: Mayoral candidates Charlie Hales and Eileen
Brady have raised a combined $208,000 for their campaigns. Mayor Sam
Adams’ campaign account is $139 in the hole.